Thursday, February 18, 2016

When they hired Marissa Mayer to be CEO the Board of Yahoo!
knew that she was pregnant. After all, the great minds of Silicon Valley
understand that pregnancy is merely a social construct and that nothing about
the experience of nurturing a newborn infant, to say nothing of raising a
toddler, would in any way interfere with Mayer’s ability to do her job.

Since Mayer was in the late 30s by the time she had her
first child, she was, as they say, living the dream. She had followed the
feminist life plan and has postponed marriage and family in favor of her
career. That this plan often found women having children at the same time they
reached the pinnacle of corporate success did not bother anyone.

From a feminist perspective, Marissa Mayer had it all. The only
remaining question was how were the shareholders of Yahoo! doing? By now it is
clear that Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo has been a monumental corporate failure. It is
quickly becoming the stuff of legend.

When she first arrived, however, Mayer was doing very well,
indeed. It seemed that she was turning the company around.

Within
weeks of Mayer’s arrival, the lots were packed and the headquarters was humming
till Friday evenings. Within months, Yahoo was launching products at a pace it
hadn’t hit in more than a decade. Within a year, Yahoo was winning awards and
praise from the press for its product design. By the summer of 2013, tens of
thousands of people were applying for Yahoo jobs every quarter. Yahoo finally
had a team of hundreds working on apps for smartphones.

But then, in November, 2013 Marissa Mayer did something that
had surely never before happened at the staff meeting of a large corporation.
While holding a meeting with Yahoo! employees, Mayer did not answer the
employee questions. She did not address the fact that many employees were upset
with some of her management decisions. Instead, she started reading them a
children’s book.

Business Insider describes what happened:

The
mood of Yahoo employees that day in November 2013 was not whimsical.

Some of
the people in the room were angry — angry about refused promotions and pay
raises, angry that their jobs now seemed to entail an endless series of tasks
done only because “Marissa said so,” or angry that new employees were coming
into the company and making a lot more money. They were angry because, to them,
it seemed like Marissa Mayer had said one thing and done another.

Most of
the gathered Yahoo employees and executives weren’t so mad. They were just
confused. They believed Mayer was brilliant, hardworking, and sincerely
interested in the welfare of Yahoo, its employees, and its users. They’d decided
this after Mayer came to Yahoo from Google in July 2012 and brought with her
sweeping changes that reenergized the entire company.

And then Mayer became undone:

Now, in
November 2013, the many Yahoos who had admired all Mayer’s progress wondered:
Why was Mayer throwing away all the goodwill she had earned with a series of
policies that were, at best, poorly rolled out and badly explained to employees
or, at worst, plain mistakes. They wondered, more seriously than at any time
since she joined, if Mayer was actually up for the job of saving Yahoo.

Mayer
sat in front of them all, in a chair on a stage at the far end of the cafeteria.
Next to her chair was a small table. Mayer had something with her. It looked
like a book or a folder with an illustration on it.

It gets worse:

So now
it was a Thursday: Nov. 7, 2013. Everyone in the company was waiting for Mayer
to say something to remind them that she was the CEO who was finally going to
restore Yahoo to its rightful place in the internet industry.

Mayer
took a breath. She said hello to everyone. She reminded them of the meeting’s
confidentiality. She said she looked through their questions and she had
something she wanted to read. It had been a book in her hands, after all. A
children’s book.

She
began to read.

"Bobbie
had a nickel all his very own. Should he buy some candy or an ice cream
cone?"

Did she know who she was? Did she know where she was? Did
she understand her role and her duty toward company employees and shareholders?

Apparently, not. She seemed to wish that she were at home
with her eleven-month-old baby, reading a story. Whatever the cause of her dissociative state, it is clear that juggling the roles of CEO and new mother
was not working out. Embracing the role of mother by infantilizing your staff does not inspire confidence.

More recently, when Mayer was nine months pregnant with
twins, she decided to throw a Gatsby themed Christmas bash. That she would not
have recognized the impropriety of a woman in her condition seeming to indulge
in decadent pursuits boggles the mind.

According
to sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has designated
Wednesday as the day of the week to make massive employee cuts that the company
announced at its earnings call weeks ago. But, instead of just felling the ax
at once of 15 percent of staff, she has dragged the pain out in several weekly
layoffs.

And
today, the hits seem to be largely happening at Yahoo’s media unit and also in
Los Angeles. Re/codepreviously
reported that the division was going to see a lot of cost cuts, especially
in Mayer’s once vaunted digital “magazine” efforts. It was not so long ago that
the company touted its splashy plan to hire big names to helm these offerings,
in food, beauty and tech. All those are now getting consolidated and
reorganized, said multiple sources, with some verticals going poof.

She must have had some message that she was trying to impart via the children's story.....as one who has been known to perpetrate analogies in business presentations, I have to have a little sympathy.

Re the Blood Oaths...the way you keep key people in a troubled situation is (a) put them in positions where they have considerable authority and autonomy (maybe more than they could get were they to jump ship), (b) develop a good enough relationship with them that there is a feeling of trust and even of loyalty, and (c) pay them well for the risk they are taking.